Launched on Indigenous Peoples’ Day 2025, seventeen Indigenous artists from across North America, installed their own exhibition in a takeover of the American Wing of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City as it ended its centennial year.  The exhibition was unsanctioned. The Met did not know it was coming. 

Using a web-based AR experience, requiring no app downloads, visitors can hold up their phones and watch the museum’s paintings and sculptures transform into living works by contemporary Indigenous artists. Through this AR installation, the American Wing becomes a space where Indigenous presence, creativity, and stories are centered. The exhibition challenges past propaganda embedded in American art history to open space for dialogue about truth, history, and representation today. The intervention invites visitors to slow down, look deeper, and experience the museum’s collection in new ways. It creates a dialogue between artists and visitors, activists and allies, past and future generations.

ENCODED, is not a protest, or a demand for inclusion, it is a ceremonial act of remembering and reimagining; it is a portal inviting us to see what happens when new narratives enter old frames.

It is not a response to power. It IS power.

This is more than an ephemeral exhibition. It is a movement of many movements: this exhibition extends beyond the museum as a reminder of what has always been here and is an offering of a collective imagination towards a shared future.

ENCODED takes place on Lenapehoking, the homeland of the Lenape people. The Lenape were forcibly removed from this land. Today’s Lenape communities, culture and sovereignty are represented by the Delaware Tribe of Indians in Bartlesville, Oklahoma; the Delaware Nation Lenni Lenape in Anadarko, Oklahoma; the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican Community in Bowler, Wisconsin; the Munsee-Delaware Nation at Muncey, Ontario; the Delaware Nation at Moraviantown, Ontario. Learn more about the Lenape here.